About Rebbe Nachman’s Chair

Shortly before Rosh Hashanah 1808, one of Rebbe Nachman’s followers, the shochet (ritual slaughterer) of Teplik, brought the Rebbe an exquisitely handcrafted chair. The Rebbe asked the shochet how long it had taken him to make the chair, and he replied that he had worked an hour a day for the previous six months. The Rebbe said, “Then for half a year, you spent an hour each day thinking of me.”

During the Cossack raids against the Jews in the Ukraine in the early 1920s, the chair was dismantled and cut into small pieces by Reb Tzvi Aryeh Lippel. He carried it from Tcherin to Kremenchug, some twenty miles (thirty-two kilometers) distant, running nearly the entire time. The chair was deposited with the Rosenfeld family of Kremenchug.

In 1936 Reb Moshe Ber Rosenfeld brought the chair to Jerusalem. In 1959 it was restored by craftsmen from the Israel Museum. In 1984 the chair was again refinished, by Katriel’s of Jerusalem, and placed on display in the Breslov synagogue in the Meah Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem, where it can be seen today.